Premier League TV rights: fans to foot the bill?

It's official: Sky Digital and NTL customers will have to subscribe separately to Sky Sports and Setanta to get all 138 live Premier League matches each season from August 2007.

Currently the cheapest Sky Sports package offering four channels - with other entertainment and movie services bundled in - is £20.25 per month, for the first three months (rising up to £42.50 thereafter) while subscribing to Setanta's seven channel package costs £14 a month.

Neither Sky or Setanta has revealed their pricing policies yet, but it seems certain that footie fans will end up paying more than a combined £34.25 come August next year if they want to sign up to both, given that the two companies have coughed up more than £1.7bn between them for live Premiership rights over three years.

Sky forked out £1.314bn for 92 Premiership matches a season from August 2007, and Setanta splashed £392m for the remaining 46 games each year.

That works out at £4.76m per game for Sky and £2.82m a match for Setanta over the course of the new three year Premier League deal - considerably more than the £2.46m Sky paid per match for all live rights three years ago. It's a fair bet that this extra cost will be passed onto subscribers, somehow or other.

If there's any good news for football fans, it's that from August 2007 Sky Sports subscribers will actually get slightly more live Premiership matches per season - 92 compared to 88.

This is because Sky currently offers 50 of its 138 games as pay per view via its Premiership Plus service, for an extra £50 per season, or around £6-£8 per match. But from next August Sky is dropping Prem Plus and offering all its live Premiership matches to Sky Sports monthly subscribers.

Setanta is expected to offer some of its Premier League match as PPV and is also looking at giving Freeview box owners access to live Premiership action, via the Top Up TV pay-TV service.

But whichever way Sky and Setanta package up their deals, fans' fears are likely to be realised - they will have to shell out more, while the wallets of clubs, players and agents will swell.

Is this what the European Commission had in mind when it forced the Premier League to restructure the TV rights tendering process? Talk about the law of unintended consequences.